Apple’s 10th Gen iPad catastrophically fails standard durability test (video)

Just in case you needed one more reason to snub Apple‘s latest “regular” iPad and instead try to save for the slightly older fifth-gen iPad Air or a state-of-the-art iPad Pro (be it the 2022 or 2021 edition), your favorite destroyer of gadgets of all sizes is back at it, absolutely shattering the hot new 10.9-incher on video with little to no effort.
There’s really no dancing around what could prove a major issue for iPad (2022) owners in the long run – this is a fundamentally flawed device likely to break beyond the point of no repair if you have a habit of putting your phones or tablets in the back pocket (literally) and you tend to sometimes forget what’s in there.
The good news is the kind of abuse JerryRigEverything’s Zack Nelson routinely subjects his videos’ protagonists to is not always associated with day-to-day “normal” use. In other words, there’s a very good chance your “vanilla” iPad 10 will be just fine if you remember not to sit on it and simply go about your business watching movies, browsing, gaming, scribbling, and doing whatever else you typically do with a tablet of this size.
On the other hand, it clearly shouldn’t be this easy to snap a $450 and up gadget released in 2022 like a twig with one’s bare hands, especially when things are so radically different for some of the (admittedly costlier) competition.
All of the new iPad’s structural problems seem to be connected with the Smart Connector, whose three little magnetic dots are awkwardly placed in the middle of one of the slate’s sides rather than its back. That’s probably the main reason why the Apple M1-powered iPad Pro (2021) survived a similar durability test, bending but not breaking under Zack Nelson’s presumably not-superhuman physical pressure.

The shocking fragility of the tenth-generation non-Pro, non-Air, and non-mini iPad made it easy to perform a quick teardown in the space of the above 10 minutes as well, also revealing one of the 10.9-incher’s design strengths.

At first glance at least, this puppy looks pretty easy to repair (for someone who’s done that sort of thing before), although curiously enough, the inside of the Apple A14 Bionic-based iPad (2022) also uncovers a whole lot of empty space that could have been utilized for the inclusion of more than two speakers or, ahem, a good old fashioned headphone jack.

You may also like...